Pay no attention to the people behind the curtain

Monday, August 06, 2007

Charlie Sykes Supports Gay Porn

He started it on his radio show this morning because he supposedly established that all the folks involved with the DailyKos website/movement hate the troops and are extreme left-wing radicals.

Now pay attention to the supposed logic here. Sykes confirmed this premise by featuring one diarist for Daily Kos, A. Whitney Brown, who is a former Saturday Night Live cast member. Here is one of Brown’s sentences that are now pinging around among right-wing bloggers:

“Do I still support the individual men and women who have given so much to serve their country? No. I think they’re a bunch of idiots. I also think they’re morally retarded.”

(I'll leave aside the point that Folkbum already made in a comment to the preceding DailyKos post: That this Brown fellow is a professional comedian with his tongue in his cheek. I'll also decline to mention that the DailyKos founder, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, is a U.S. Army veteran.)

What I want to focus on is the fact that A. Whitney Brown is just one diarist among a multitude for the DailyKos site, and is not even among the 15 contributing writers. Others such as Keith Schmitz no doubt know the DailyKos site better than me, but Brown's peripheral role seems to resemble the status of folks who leave comments on Folkbum. Brown is one of many and there is very little control exerted on what he says.

Nevertheless, Sykes is hoping his listeners are stupid enough to hear some sentences from one dude’s DailyKos writings and think that everyone connected to DailyKos embraces those ideas.

But, if he wants to take that approach, let's look at Charlie Sykes’s own operation on the internet for a sec. Now, unlike the more open format of DailyKos that fosters a widely shared conversation, the website of Sykes restricts input a lot – no guest bloggers, no comments allowed, a small blogroll. But Charlie Sykes does allow website visitors to access some select few right-wing sites. Those sites that Sykes blesses with access include The Weekly Standard.

You might be liberal and not know much about that publication, so I'll tell you everything you need to know about it.

The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb – who as online editor is more responsible for the site than a diarist is for DailyKos -- has been attacking a U.S. soldier in Iraq, Scott Thomas Beauchamp. Beauchamp became Goldfarb’s target when he described for The New Republic reprehensible conduct of fellow soldiers. The Weekly Standard attempted to discredit the story by attacking sources such as Beauchamp. But The Weekly Standard’s own sources for the counterattack, as Max Blumenthal shows here, are revealing:

Among all the active duty soldiers used by Goldfarb to undermine Beauchamp, only one is cited by name: Matt Sanchez, a corporal in the Marine reserves. "Frankly, I don't believe ANY of this story," Sanchez proclaimed in the Standard about Beauchamp's diary. Who is Sanchez? According to Goldfarb, he is simply a soldier "who stands behind his work."

But Sanchez is more than a mere man in uniform. As I reported for Media Matters today, Sanchez is also a conservative pro-war activist whose bio includes a stint as he gay porn actor Rod Majors, (star of such filmic classics as "Beat Off Frenzy") and an illustrious part-time job as a male prostitute -- facts he has acknowledged "leaving ... off my curriculum vitae."

There you have it. A homosexual male, who is a porn movie actor and prostitute to boot, is connected to Charlie Sykes’s website. According to Charlie's logic, that should tell us all we need to know about Sykes himself.